The Economics of Blogging According to Economists.

Ever question the value of blogging? 
According to an economic study, blogging will:

• Drives transactions.
• Improve reputation.
• Drive thought leadership.

Here's why:

Amplify’d from www.voxeu.org

Economists make it their business to know about incentives. Indeed they devote entire blogs to the subject. But what are the incentives for top economists to ‘waste’ time on these blogs in the first place? This column calls on researchers out there to find out.

The results are quite interesting. The link from a blog increases significantly the paper’s downloads and abstract views in the month of the blog publication and, to a lesser extent, in the following month. Figure 1 shows that some blogs have a very large visibility ‘multiplier’ effect. A quote from Paul Krugman’s blog, or Marginal Revolution, or Freakonomics leads to an increase in the number of abstract views by between 300 and 470 units (compared to a monthly average of 10.3 views for NBER papers). Moreover the number of downloads increases by between 33-100 units (compared to the monthly average of 4.2 for the average NBER paper).

For the second hypothesis, the authors use the results of a survey about the most admired economists in the US, and intersect the results with the rankings (RePEc) of the top 500 economists in the world, based on scientific publications. The authors test if the probability of appearing in the list of the most admired economists, controlling for scientific ranking, is influenced by being a blogger or not. It is. Bloggers are about 40% more likely to appear in the list of most admired economists – an effect equivalent to that of being among the 50 top world economists based on publications records.

Finally, to assess the impact of blogs, the authors conduct a random selection experiment on 619 students of Masters and PhDs in Economic Development, young economists of the World Bank, and young employees at NGOs, some of which were prompted to check out a new blog to follow the World Bank. The results show that those who are exposed to the blogs give a better assessment of the quality of research at the World Bank, and of the desirability to get a job there. Read more at www.voxeu.org

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1fv6s